Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
Hello back frens
User ID: 2022
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
6mo ago
I’m surprised at your lack of vision here, 2rafa.
That seems totally in character. The best rafa posts are a window into the Id of the beancounter, and many heuristics that really really almost always work are found there.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
What will lead the GOP?
I think trumpist campaigning plays out pretty differently when there are multiple people doing it. Im not totally happy with the following explanation of such campaigning, and expect people to dispute some things, but I feel I have to at least attempt one, and I think the conclusion that theres some void to be filled here is relatively clear from just considering the question.
The way the politics game is played traditionally, candidates talk about their policies, are probed for gaffes and flipflops, lose some points for not aswering questions, etc. This gives voters some basis for making decisions, but it can also lead to an "emperor with no clothes" situation with politicians trying to comply with thing voters actively dislike. Trumps strategy exploited a big, interconnected bunch of such issues by rejecting this sort of accountability entirely. This includes saying the populist things, but also not caring how offensive or contradictory you are doing it, never apologising for that, etc. The goal is to trigger a preference cascade towards not judging by those standards. This obviously worked pretty well for him, but it also gives a drastically lower-resolution picture than the conventional strategy. Thats fine if youre far away from all the other candidates anyway, but what if youre not? Now youll need something to distinguish yourself, and I think the great question of the next few republican primaries will be what that should be. Here are the options as I see them:
Inertia-based
Trump won the '20 and '24 primaries because he is the Trump, noone was gonna out-trump him and so noone seriously tried. The path of least resistance going forward is propably that Trump remains in charge of trumpism, continues to voice himself prominently in the media and xitter/truth social, and expects the candidate and later president to dance by his fiddle. I expect this not to go well: People propably arent excited to vote for a president who is outshone even as a figurehead. A falling out at some point is also likely, especially since Trump will likely be more erratic when the role thats naturally the center of attention is filled by someone else. The best case scenario is propably that this goes well once, and then either Trump is too old to stay relevant, or the new guy falls out with him and manages to "win" the internal conflict before his time is up, and then the next election is something else.
The "better" version of inertia is propably some kind of "the party decides". There are plenty of countries that manage without primaries, and while occasional upsets propably cant be prevented entirely if primaries are mandatory, something more like that seems possible. However, the republicans are specifically not set up for this. The democrats have "the groups", and a kind of permanent party leadership - meanwhile, you never really hear about the RNC, except in the fixed phrase "RNC convention". They long where much more of an extension of the current president(ial cnadidate). So the somewhat-possible version of this is that Trump anoints Vance his successor, and Vance some else, they remain supportive of the new guy but in the background, and afer a few times of this you have a more substantial party leadership - but leadership at any time deciding to separate from the previous ones would likely break this, so it takes a long streak indeed.
Return of the media
Candidates go back to conventional campaigning, with a somewhat shifted overton window. This could happen if it seems like political wins were big enough that shielding yourself from the media is no longer necessary, and its also the default option if trumpism has become too unpopular for another go. If it hasnt, there will be significant hesitation before adopting this option, as rejecting it was one of the central ideas of trumpism. Those dont die easily, and its not even clear if the problems of that system where just inerta or an attractor.
There is also the question of the trumpist media. Its been 10 years of Trump on the right, new media outlets have been founded and older ones reconstructed to supporting him. Theyre not really set up to evaluate politicians in a meaningful way, and follow his lead instead. What direction they will take once there is no longer an obvious leader of trumpism is in many ways a similar question to the one Im asking here. If they just try to pivot to evaluation without any kind of more systematic ideological program, that will be one huge slapfight that propably eventually ends in one, but it sure is going to be rough until then. Writing them all off leaves only people who are in significant part not even republicans in name anymore, and propably means a collapse of the right.
Full bore
Candidates engage in an epic rap battle, whoever has the greatest stage presence, the most charismatic voice, and the best alliterative insults wins. This is theoretically the closest thing to multiple people running the original campaign unmodified. I think its unlikely to happen in a pure form, but the the problem of trumpist campaigning that I outlined is with too many candidates running like this. If noone is trying that anymore, it could be viable again. So there could be a mixed equilibrium here, where theres one candidate trying full bore in addition to whatever else ends up happening, with either winning the candidacy sometimes. And since theres no reliable way to have exactly one guy like that, sometimes candidates like that will have to face each other, and it would have to go like that.
Anything you think Ive missed?
'all models are wrong, but some models are useful'
Yes, what do you think "useful" means? Of course, your evaluation of whats high-utility will have to include all sorts of knock-on effects - but it cant include things like "this is useful to say because its true". This is of course incoherent, you cant actually decide whats high-utility without knowing whats true, and Scott the human knows what truth is when its about normal topics - but thats what the argument of the post implies when taken seriously (you will notice that the section thats actually talking about how language works is very short relative to the post). Theres no conceptual role left for truth, as distinct from "the outcome of usefully structuring language".
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4mo ago
And what concrete test can we apply to identify such subjects, which would tell us whether and which immigrants are subjects?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4mo ago
If you just mean you get a bad vibe, then fine, but I dont see which rule it breaks. There are other rebuttals that could be made, but I dont want to make a rebuttal - my point isnt even that its right or wrong, its a) this comment is 4x as long as it needs to b) if it wasnt plushed up, you might notice its an extremely klischee point and try to do more than reenact arguments weve seen a 1000 times.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2yr ago
When was the vaccine mandate rational? I remember when the debate got big here in Austria, there were already multible countries with 90%+ vax rates that had new flareups.
Those are two different things. Whats useful for dealing with whale hunting is not whats useful for understanding. As for the latter, Scott disagrees with that:
If I’m willing to accept an unexpected chunk of Turkey deep inside Syrian territory to honor some random dead guy – and I better, or else a platoon of Turkish special forces will want to have a word with me – then I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it’ll save someone’s life.
Yes, this is another example of asserting that there are two kinds of words, and that the "pragmatic" ones should be optimised according to reasons provided using the "primary" ones (the axis of thingspace), without explaining how to distinguish the two. Yuds version is better in that it at least gives you a concept of a plan he might propose - like "primary properties are continuous" - but it doesnt give us a system that could be evaluated for corresponding to our epistemic situation, or even being coherent. I also dont think his version of "optimise" has considerations like "Norton really wants to be an emperor so lets include him in the category":
Suppose we mapped all the birds in the world into thingspace, using a distance metric that corresponds as well as possible to perceived similarity in humans
This helps, because you have to describe your "optimisation target" in terms of primary words to avoid circularity - I doubt the Yud primary words could actually be used for the Scott objective. For the Scott version, you need to make it so "aggregate human preferences" is a real word, but "woman" is not. For an illustrative example of this problem, see here:
Similarly, if I’m thinking about whether shrimp are conscious, I’m thinking about how shrimp are similar to and different from creatures we normally think of as ‘conscious’, and what these differences indicate about whether there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp.
where you might notice that "whether there’s something it’s like to be an X" is well established in philosophical discourse as being pretty much exactly as difficult as "consciousness", and has in many ways even started the trend of considering consciousness difficult in analytic philosophy. Thats what happens when your redefinition attempts accidentally hit on one of the terms in the optimisation objective, which happened because youre not systematic about it, because youve convinced yourself its unnecessary by intellectual descent from the exact thing in Scotts post Im objecting to.
(This isnt really relevant to the gender conversation, but one consequence of these cluster words is that all logical arguments, which require language compositionality, come with an asterisk to them. This is highly relevant when you try to use such arguments to convince people of a rather unusual conclusion, where you will not have an opportunity to see if these particular words "empirically describe the cluster well enough for these purposes" until its too late.)
it is highly practical to be able to open up a minimal number of them, for example to debate what should be included as a mammal without pre-emptively also debating what "hair", "water", "leg", "swim", and "definition" mean, exactly
You, on the other hand, seem content with there not being a real distinction, and as far as I can tell youre saying here that my complaint that "this principle requires selective application" is true of Scotts theory and also in reality, without any way to be systematic about it.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
Do you mean asexual as in no sex with people, or no masturbation either?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4mo ago
Well, weve had normie-ish conservatives before, and you described yourself as a low-openness rural dweller. I dont think my argument takes a lot of language. Its basically: How do you legally distinguish between an invasion and illegal immigration? Theres a continuum there, and some cases relatively far down that continuum, like primitive raiding, would be considered an invasion. See my discussion with Gillitrut for some hammering-out. Obviously today, these seem like distinct things, and saying illegal immigration is like an invasion is a controversial political point, but in a time before any immigration was illegal, is it really so implausible that they would address invasions in a way that includes that?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4mo ago
Someone on twitter had a good zinger - if the child was being abused by their illegal immigrant parents, would the courts do anything about that? Well, they would. And, since they would, the children are 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States.
Of course, we also "do something" about invaders. We also prosecute animal cruelty, that doesnt mean the animals are subject to our jurisdiction. And besides, all sorts of strange things can happen when crimes are downstream of other crimes.
Like, the entire problem here is that immigration restrictions have created a novel situation not anticipated by the original legislators. Something about this is going to be weird, no matter how you resolve it. So you cant have the One Zinger to rule them all.
More generally, even if you bought the arguments that the clause somehow excluded the parents, nothing would transfer that status to the children.
Youre introducing a new variable here without saying how its set. Thats not particularly an argument for anything - "You cant definitely disprove X therefore its true" doesnt work. You still need to explain that data with that new hypothesis - so, how is the childrens status actually determined, such that the invasion exception holds?
And of course, as is tradition everyone even adjacent to the legal field will have to pretend this is really a debate about what people in the 1800s thought 'jurisdiction' meant. You don't have to though.
Im well aware. I write this because I think its valuable to show people what the autismo mode actually looks like.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4mo ago
If were "cause to die" only in the extended consequentialist sense, then Im not sure theres much reason for this skepticism.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4mo ago
In the current top level post chains
I agree hes acting leftist here.
Goodguy is on the record for arguing that the 2nd Amendment should be reconsidered. The position itself is less important than the reasoning why, which- to paraphrase- was a lack of trust in other people in the country to have guns.
I agree this conflicts the red tribe, but thats not the same as putting him in the blue tribe - which would be exactly what he claims. By your argument, wouldnt something like this tell us hes right-wing?
A 'how you support it' paradigm would easily go 'they are both left'- they may disagree what they consider central things, just as the Trotskyists and Stalinists hated eachother passionately, but they are both fundamentally class-based approaches of the leftist spectrum who argue that social hierarchies and contexts should be the basis of analysis and redefining class privileges, whether it's through an economic marxist or cultural marxist paradigm.
This would be a good point if you gave examples of him supporting things with class-based approaches.
Overall Im not convinced by this, because I think for this discussion you should evaluate his politics from things other than behaviour in this thread, and you havent shown me much of that.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2yr ago
The higher IQ applies to the ashkenazim and is thought to be from selection in the late middle ages and after, but the pattern of concentrating in certain elite professions and the majority getting mad about it applies to jews much more generally, and so is presumably not explained by it.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1mo ago
There isn't a consensus sorting of everyone into male and female either
I agree thats the status quo; but success for the trans movement would be creating one. Thats what I said.
they call a definitional core of "unambiguous women", but this would look like "phenotypical women not asserting they are not + progressives in good standing asserting to be women".
I think this goes back to whether the definition by self-identification is circular or not. I think we all, including OP, know that progressives can answer "a woman is whoever says theyre a woman" in response to the question. He must not consider that a real answer.
neither side is okay with transracialism (central-example whites asserting that they are central-example blacks).
Actually, I dont think theyre necessarily fine with non-central people asserting to be either, either.
where both agree on central examples, the boundaries are fuzzy so few would be comfortable defining an exhaustive predicate and committing to it
The difference is that with gender, progressives are accused, IMO accurately, of their criteria ultimately depending on sex stereotypes, and they deny it. The right on race, once its out that they care about it at all, doesnt really mind their categorisation judgements being understood. I dont think progressives even have a theory there, true or not, that they would want to deny.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2mo ago
Heaven is basically another dimension. Point A in heaven doesn't correspond in any way with point B on Earth.
I dont think its really that defined. If you wanted to make it into a scientific model, this propably fits the typical opinions pretty well, but Im not sure you need to. As an analogy, what would happen if roadrunner and coyote were to run into the tunnel holding hands? AFAIC, once youre in the realm of basically-magic already, its fine to say NULL.
Also Im pretty sure the mormon astronaut thing did involve other planets at one point.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
3mo ago
I dont generally look for these things either, because with more "normal" policies you have a good enough idea anyway that the details dont matter, and its not like these forecasts are that precise to begin with - unfortunately that means I dont know how to find one now that I would want it. Im pretty sure even good tariff equation apologetics is not what Im looking for.
I have kept my youtube free of politics-first content. Most political discussion is very unpleasant for me in audio, which likely contributed to achieving this, but I would very much recommend.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4mo ago
The Russians have secured a swathe of territory in Donbass, they took Mariupol.
Yes, but in the hypothetical different nuclear equilibrium, they wouldnt get to keep it.
I think there must be some concrete reason why all the powers invest so much into conventional forces
The purely nuclear equilibria have very sharp rules. If theres a situation where neither party is allowed to nuke, its a free win for whoever invested in conventional forces. It cant actually, realistically happen outside a toy example world set up with it. In the cold war, I think neither party would have been willing to nuke over losing individual european satellites that somehow happen without a general attack.
I think youre just not confident enough because this mechanism is new to you. Start out small in using it. My example was chosen for illustrating what sort of thing I mean, not for being convincing. Something more realistic might be e.g. the discussions early in this war whether Russia could get away with a "tactical" nuke - they propably cant, but there may well have been a world where they could.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4mo ago
I thought we were talking about cases where "everyone" agreed.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4mo ago
It's also usually not appreciated that the language "subject to the jurisdiction" seems to apply to the child, not the parent.
Ive thought about that, but it also seems that whats relevant is the subjection at the time of birth. Because if its not, then what? Constant updates, and your citizenship pops in and out of existence depending on subjection? And at birth it would, barring strange circumstances, be identical to the parents.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4mo ago
I'm with Scott's The categories were made for man(...) here
If I remember right you understand enough math that you should see the difficulty with the distinction between "facts" and "categorisations" hes trying to draw. Have you thought about that more/found a way its not self-undermining?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
5mo ago
Ok, I its vaguely familiar now, but Im still not sure I get it. Reading the blockedandreported post on it, Im not outraged. It seems kind of pointless, and I can see how you might turn it into a bad and outragous argument, but it wasnt done there.
Now, it's different.
Well, it isnt for me. Anyway, nice to see you here. Though I have to admit I wouldnt have recognised you. I just went through your profile and theres a few typical comments, but propably too few to notice. Now I wonder, am I different here too?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
6mo ago
Maybe this is "overly technical", but tens of millions across the US doesnt mean shit. Thompsons salary couldnt buy all his customers a coffee. Theres just no way someone will ever not feel exploited without understanding this unless they live under a rock.
Interesting topic in a thread below
I think this is probably a point of disagreement for many here and so worth discussing on its own. I see two larger topics that this could become a test for: One is the model of "general competence"/IQ maximalism, expecting successful people to be successful at ~everything, vs a tradeoff between abstract thinking and practical or social skills. Second, whether our current elites are in some sense a paper tiger - bullshit jobs, Overcredentialism, etc.
*"I had a patient, let’s call him ‘Henry’ for reasons that are to become clear, who came to hospital after being picked up for police for beating up his fifth wife."
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